our artificial needs not a refuge from Him, but a barrier against Him, one which turns the providence of His love against ourselves. "The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully." Our ground has done this and we have abused its plenty. We have pulled down barns that were ample for the real needs of the fullest earthly life, and have built greater in which to store up for our own selves, in an excess, the free bounty of the earth. We have overfed ourselves and robbed and starved our brothers. We have piled need upon need; we have built barn after barn to hold what these monstrous needs of ours demand. Soul," we have said to ourselves, and it was animal soul we meant, "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry.' Shall we complain of the providence of God when He so plainly shows us that we are fools? Can He serve us better than by letting us prove to ourselves what we really are?"Fool," He says, "thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." In the parable it is "this night"; in our lives it is all day and every day. Towards a recognition of this inevitable requirement of God, this judgment of every day, His providence directs and leads us. By trial and error we, His sons, discover what it really is that He requires, what it really is that sons of His may be. By trial and error, we say yet all the while He beckons us, summons us by the voice of our spirits within us, by saints and prophets, by every seeker after truth, by poets and singers, by every adventurer of the spirit, towards the way of life. "I am the way," He says, "the truth and the life." "Is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow? we may hear the Lover of the world say, amid the roar and clash of its inventions and the moaning of its agonies. Is there any sorrow like unto His who, Himself bearing the world's grief, holds the secret of its joy and blessedness in His hand and proffers it to be refused? He comes unceasingly to His own, and His own reject Him. So long as they reject Him, just so long, no longer, they will complain against Him. Is there any sorrow like unto His? I. INTRODUCTORY. (a) Faith in Christ strengthened not weakened (b) Faith must obey the law of dying to live. II. THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS. (a) The justification of the cry Back to Christ." (b) The Gospel-portrait. III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY. (a) Pauline and Johannine-the pre-existent eternal Christ. IV. A PHILOSOPHY OF THE INCARNATION. (a) Consonant with the ideas of Creation and Providence set forth in the preceding Essay. (b) The historic Incarnation as the climax and revelation of the secret of the selfexpression of God. V. THE QUESTION OF THE MODE OF THE INCARNATION. (a) Need for frankness. (b) Philosophic difficulty of the doctrine of treating the Virgin Birth as historical fact. (c) The Scriptural evidence historically insufficient. (d) Insistence on acceptance not consonant with our Lord's own demands. (e) Modernists and the Creeds. The religious value of debated articles not endangered by treating them as symbolical rather than historical. VI. FAITH AND EXPERIENCE. THE INCARNATION "is We are far too apt to limit and mechanise the great doctrine of the Incarnation which forms the centre of the Christian faith. "God manifest in the flesh" is a more profound philosophical truth than the loftiest flight of speculation that outsoars all predicates and, for the greater glory of God, declares Him unknowable.A. S. PRINGLE-PATTISON, "The Idea of God in Recent Philosophy," p. 157. I THE object of this Essay is to set forth a personal interpretation of the doctrine of the Incarnation, in the light of the principle of development expounded in an earlier Essay in this volume. For this reason I begin with a brief positive statement of my faith, the grounds and content of which I shall attempt later to expound in more detail. I want to make clear, if I can, that the truth as it is in Christ Jesus is for me the only truth: that I believe that He was and is perfect man, sharing with us, in its fulness, every element of true manhood, and that I believe, no less firmly, that He was and is perfect God. We see in |